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Hughesnet was horrible. They lied to me about throttled speeds on the Gen5 sales call. Told me it would be up to 3 Mbps. Wrong. It never exceeded 1.4 Mbps and browsing during peak congestion (5pm - 12am) was like dialup or worse due to the ping and jitter lagging (whether throttled or full speed). I was throttled during the day, when I do most of my work from home and there is no congestion. Customer service refused to acknowledge that degradation of service was due to congestion and always required ridiculous procedures of testing speeds on a 3rd party platform and connected via ethernet. If you were throttled, forget getting help with your service's performance. Blaming my equipment when hundreds of customers complain about the exact same issues. Besides, downloading files was never the issue. It was website load times, constant delays with net handshakes, etc.
Rant over. Viasat is consistently delivering more than the bandwidth allocated by my plan (Bronze is supposed to be 12Mbps, but usually tests around 17Mbps). Even during peak usage hours, it is delivering 10+Mbps. Streaming works better (although initial picture quality is lower than HN was but it soon clears up into good watchable quality). Websites load faster. Everything works like it seems it should and so far, the wifi router hasn't had any weird issues like the HN one did (random resets, loss of connection, DNS errors, web acceleration errors).
I'm paying $15/mo more than I was with Hughesnet but it is worth having usable internet all the time. Thanks Viasat. And to those who have complaints about Viasat-2 service: If your internet is working like mine, you don't know how good you have it until you've spent 2 years with Hughesnet! @GabeU and any other Hughesnet ppl on this forum, try out your competition and maybe you will stop evangelizing an inferior service and belittling upset HN customers over on that forum. Your awesome speed test results with HN are not the norm and I genuinely wonder if as evangelists, your traffic is prioritized like mine seemed to be anytime I complained enough.
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Posted 1 year ago
Diana, Viasat Employee
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GabeU, Champion
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If a customer needs help, or asks for help, I give it to the best of my ability, and reps pick up when and where I can't or don't have that ability.
I have no reason to try the competition when my service works just fine for me.
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I have been a tech for a long time. I started installing TV antennas and then we got the huge dish for Satellite TV. Now? They are very small.
Hopefully all internet will be good as fiber optics expands.
HughesNet is not what they advertise. Sure you get a fast download. You get it for 12 days and then it slows to a crawl.
Then, to get streaming, I had to wait until the next month started and 12 days of high speed streaming again.
I could not ever get tech service to call back when my service died. I finally found the installer and he came and got it going, They told him that it was my equipment.
He got aggressive with them and told them that he installed this system and told them that he was their serviceman and I know you have a problem on your end!
They finally did what the serviceman told them and he got it going.
If you can’t believe your own techs, then someone needs a little training in human relations.
I can give a lot more facts about them but if you want a bad experience and you stream all the time, go get HughesNet.
Don’t believe me? Go get HughesNet and see for yourself.
I don’t really care for you that say their service is good,
It is if you don’t use it but once or twice a week,
GabeU, Champion
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HughesNet is not what they advertise. Sure you get a fast download. You get it for 12 days and then it slows to a crawl. Then, to get streaming, I had to wait until the next month started and 12 days of high speed streaming again.That's YOUR experience. My off peak speeds average in the high 40s and my peak speeds average in the high 20s to mid 30s. I can stream without issue. My speed on the last day of the month is the same as on the first day of the month. That's MY experience.
Just like is seen on these boards, the majority of the posts you read are not good because people that are satisfied with a product or service don't tend to go out of their way to say so, whereas those unhappy with a product or service often do. And I wouldn't expect anything different on a support community.
Edit: I should add that no ISP is perfect. And I firmly believe that both my own and ViaSat strive to provide the best service possible.
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Again, another person who uses all of his priority data up and then complains. Doesn't matter if it's Hughes, Viasat, Verizon,....
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Don’t lie and deceive. Viasat may not be any better. I just know that Hughes bet is good for only 12-14 days no matter what you say. I uploaded a photo and it shows the data drops to 0 after 13 days.

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GabeU, Champion
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Lies and deception? You mean like claiming that HughesNet throttles people after thirteen days while inadvertently revealing in your next post that the reason you were being throttled, at least in that picture, which is from nearly a year ago, is because you burned through all of your Anytime Data? Like that kind of deception? HughesNet didn't burn through all of your Anytime Data in thirteen days. YOU did. They aren't responsible for how you use your data, nor how quickly you exhaust it.
One thing people will never be able to accuse me of, with any truth, is telling lies and being deceptive. I don't do so, and never have. I give people my experience. And any answer that I give that is of the definitive type is something that can be answered definitively, not something that is unique to the customer, like speed or how long data will last. As I state very often, a customer's experience is unique to them.
You accuse me of lies and deception. Give examples to support your allegations.
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I'm confused.So am I, I could swear Macintosh has a screen capture capability and it's no longer a requirement to take a selfie of your monitor. Maybe not and Apple isn't as advanced as we're led to believe...
I really don't know, the last time I considered using an Apple product was when I installed a TV antenna on my roof as a prerequisite to a networking certification.
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Stephen Rice, Champion
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GabeU, Champion
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GabeU, Champion
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Stephen Rice, Champion
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I just wish Pizza hut had an oregano topping to put on the pineapple. Domino's does but I like pizza hut better.
GabeU, Champion
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VeteranSatUser, Champion
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Stephen Rice, Champion
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VeteranSatUser, Champion
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GabeU, Champion
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Which begs the question, who has dumped Viasat for Hughesnet? Anybody?I imagine it's not the best place to ask that question. With that said, I've seen some.
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VeteranSatUser, Champion
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GabeU, Champion
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I think we all feel nearly the same about GetSat, but anyone can get on this board and ask questions about ViaSat, which is good.
Edit: I should add that I was only acknowledging the limitations of the HughesNet board and not at all suggesting that's the reason you haven't been on there in years. LOL.
GabeU, Champion
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Of course. The difference in the two sat. services are probably not really worth arguing over. The plans and data and free zones are just a personnel preference.Agreed. And the way I look at it, the better both services are the better the competition, and that's great for all of us.
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Times change, companies change, and one must keep on top of these changes for their best service.
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GabeU, Champion
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Hughesnet uses more powerful compression technology.Actually, at least in my experience and some others, while Gen4's compression was fantastic, Gen5's isn't, or in my case, it's seemingly nonexistent.
When I had Gen4, I would see data usage comparisons that were always in my favor with Glasswire and my router vs HughesNet. When Glasswire and my router would say 8GB, HughesNet would say 3.5GB or 4GB, as an example. Now, with Gen5, the tallies are virtually even.
Unfortunately, for some of the people that don't have the tools to make the comparisons that I do, when seeing the difference after an upgrade to Gen5 they automatically assume that HughesNet is "stealing" their data, never realizing that Gen4 just had great data compression.
I don't know if they had to forego the compression for Gen5 or what, but there's definitely a difference, at least for me and those who have mentioned it.
Luckily, when I upgraded from Gen4 to Gen5 I went up from my 15GB Gen4 plan instead of down, though I certainly contemplated doing the latter. With 20GB I'm fine, but I would be having a hard time with 10GB. Still, the price I pay is actually a few bucks less than I was with Gen4, so getting the higher data package works out in the end.
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Well, at least Ronald is consistent!
VeteranSatUser, Champion
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Stephen Rice, Champion
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VeteranSatUser, Champion
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Stephen Rice, Champion
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GabeU, Champion
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Stephen Rice, Champion
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Only 12 more pounds to go.
GabeU, Champion
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VeteranSatUser, Champion
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Of course, I got a lot more to lose. Lol
Stephen Rice, Champion
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Stephen Rice, Champion
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Stephen Rice, Champion
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VeteranSatUser, Champion
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However, I'm now in my second month with a fresh 40GB of data to use and I haven't seen speeds improve much at all over the "de-prioritized" period. I just tested at 250Kbps (granted it is during peak time) but last month before I used up my data, I was getting 5 Mbps during peak hours. I haven't even seen that during the day since my data refreshed. What gives?
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I understand that it's 8:30pm, but service shouldn't be so slow that web pages time out instead of loading for someone with priority data remaining, not even during primetime.
Stephen Rice, Champion
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I rarely go over my 12 gb of priority data thanks to the late night free zone. If I were out of data, my speed would be around 256 kbps tonight and up to 5 mbps during the early morning and day.

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As Ian and I both said, neither of us is out of priority data.
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I don't think Stephen grasps that some beams are insanely congested and this is our normal, *even with priority data.*
VeteranSatUser, Champion
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It is not unusual during primetime to see my speed with priority data hover around 300 - 500kbps
Just wait until the holidays....
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Well I called tech support and it was a pretty long call but better experience than HN. They tested their throughput to the modem and it said it should be 7 Mbps. We did a hard modem reset but let it sit unplugged for more than 2 minutes. Since it rebooted, speeds have been creeping back up to normal. It appears to have helped considerably but the test will be daytime. I'm keeping my fingers crossed...
Data reset was 12:01 AM, 9/24/18. Long modem reboot was just before the 11:04 PM speed test of 2.2 Mbps.
GabeU, Champion
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VeteranSatUser, Champion
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Technically, prioritized must be qualified with where something is placed in that order which is probably why Viasat states:
...we may prioritize your data behind other customers during network congestion."Must be a purist among their technical writers or marketing staff or more likely the spell checker kept flagging deprioritized as an error and were simply trying to avoid it and we haven't even started the debate over the use of may in that statement ;)
Prioritized in and of itself doesn't imply receiving priority - although generally accepted nowadays as meaning it.
But yeah regardless of preference, I do recall that thread Gabe and yes it was a failure to fully reset - usage count did but speeds didn't until some time after the reset date - my guess is the modem missed a wake up call to fully restore speed.
The bigger problem besides definition is that few seem to know what it entails or even that it exists after all this time.
VeteranSatUser, Champion
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Why dont we just say you are put at the back of the line!
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But that doesn't explain the complaint raised here - that they are still being "prioritized" after data reset. But the "speed test" (speed doesn't mean speed either, and unlimited doesn;t mean unlimited so apparently words don't matter), suggests normal congestion on an overly crowded beam given the date/times posted in the test results.
Stephen Rice, Champion
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Though we could all at least take comfort in the truly excellent food and scenery down there.
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VeteranSatUser, Champion
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Baton Rouge - Platinum 100, 1080p, 150GB - $200/mo.
Of course probably better choices than satellite in Baton Rouge ;)
GabeU, Champion
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Dont you mean deprioritzed?You know what I mean. :)
VeteranSatUser, Champion
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My thoughts also went to the normal speed changes as one enters, exists in, and exits the peak usage timeframe. So I wasn't entirely convinced that the 2-minute power down caused the speed increase. But my gut tells me it did because immediately after the reset, web pages loaded within a few seconds rather than 30 seconds to a minute like when I was out of data. I reiterate that before I ran out of data in the prior month, I was getting 5-10 Mbps throughout peak usage hours.
I get that download speed tests only give us an average picture of the service over time. Web page load times are probably longer for the same amount of data vs a download test due to the large amount of querying and responses on modern web pages and long satellite ping times.
This isn't meant to be a knock on any specific satellite provider but the next time I move, terrestrial or wireless internet service will be a requirement, not an afterthought. Stephen, your comment that we should move for a better beam almost made me ROFL. But yeah, I do like Louisiana.
Stephen Rice, Champion
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VeteranSatUser, Champion
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@fmj77, 9 miles into the woods from where I-26 crosses into Tenn. Technically the town of Marshall, north of Asheville. I'm in the back of a 200 acre cove, a 20 minute drive to civilization. I go to Avery county somewhat frequently. That's the true high country up your way.
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VeteranSatUser, Champion
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Beautiful country though. In another month there will be fantastic scenery.
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DavidBrowserGuy, Browser Expert
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Diana, Viasat Employee
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GabeU, Champion
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VeteranSatUser, Champion
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Viasat can't be any worse. If I have any internet at all, it will be better. Does anyone know if a Viasat Router has 5 ghz?
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I have had both, and find Viasat better for many years. I wouldn't say that anymore and if I was to get satellite internet again, I would not get Viasat.
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This "policy" change was a transparent attempt to drive folk off older (and better) plans to newer (more restricted) plans - less data for more money. Frankly, the only reason we remain with ViaSat is because we have nowhere else to go. ViaSat clearly does not give a damn. They don't care if we are happy, they don't even care if we leave. Their focus has shifted from residential to commercial/government and they'd be happiest if their residential customers went elsewhere.
I wish they would return to the company they had been before the launch of ViaSat-2 and the shift in company strategy. Perhaps if ViaSat-2 had not been compromised, they might not have adjusted their strategy to be so openly hostile to the residential market. The reality is 1) they did make that shift; 2) Their customers are openly and vocally pissed about it and 3) they do not care.
I'd sure like to find the "old" ViaSat. Has anyone seen them?
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So it looks like I'll be suffering with you all until the Low Earth satellites are up and running. Fiber sounds like a dream though. Their customers are getting 1Gbps download for less than $100/month.
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Given that the lowest service level my co-op plans to offer is 100 Mbps, it will be heaven on earth.
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Mark Davis
Dontrellz Page
I wish we could get on the new satellite Viasat 2 in Mississippi all we knew for is poor service
Regina
Anniem05
VeteranSatUser, Champion
Please report what you think of Viasat once you get it installed.
GabeU, Champion
It is possible, though, that you've been hacked via your WiFi. If that's the case, it's someone very close to you. They would have to be within about 150 feet of your modem, at the very most, and most likely closer than that. Any further than that and it becomes impossible, unless you are using a 3rd party router with more WiFi range. If this is what's happening, it's also possible that they've installed some type of software on your system that allows them to know what keystrokes you have input, or to even be able to see your passwords through your networked devices.
It's also possible that you've downloaded some type of malware, rather than being hacked. Malware can cause high data usage. This is more likely than having been hacked.
With that said, the majority of the time data is being used it's actually being used by one or more connected devices, and not from hacking or malware.
Make sure to run your Antivirus scan(s). Also, if you don't already have it, Malwarebytes is a very good, and often recommended, scanner for Malware. It's also free. It's important to do this, as if what is causing the data usage isn't discovered and remedied, it's unlikely that it will stop with your new ISP.
VeteranSatUser, Champion
Anniem05
Anniem05
GabeU, Champion
HughesNet's IP addresses change often, sometimes more than once each day, and even if someone did happen to get into your system without anything being downloaded to your device(s) and allowing them to home in quickly, the second the IP address changed they would be gone, and then they would have to find their way back in. Unless there is some specific reason you're being targeted, it's highly unlikely that anyone would be wasting all of their time trying to hack you, then try to hack you again, over and over and over, as it would take a considerable amount of time to do so. Each time, it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack that's among dozens of other haystacks.
What is it this person is doing?
GabeU, Champion
If not, I would suggest doing so. A corporate based rep will be able to help if they're needed.
Anniem05
VeteranSatUser, Champion
Good luck!
GabeU, Champion
Regarding your computers, I wouldn't replace them. I would just replace the hard drives, as if there is a nefarious program on your system, that's where it will reside. If they're Windows 10 or Windows 8.1 computers and you don't have recovery media on DVDs, you can download new copies from Microsoft and install it. If they came with Windows 10, it's even easier as they will automatically activate due to Microsoft's system already having your digital license saved. You can get new drives fairly cheap, and even SSDs are becoming much more affordable per GB.
Then, of course, never connect or use anything with them again that could have had things downloaded to them, like flash drives or RW media. And download all programs fresh, of course.
I have Webroot, too. It's a great AV. Plus, it's data usage friendly. :)
Again, I hope someone can help you. I hate that you have had to deal with all that. :(
Edit: I meant recovery media on DVDs that came with the system, not that you created afterwards. The latter could include the problem.
Anniem05
GabeU, Champion
The first is that HughesNet's phone service ranges from adequate at best to totally useless at worst. This is why I recommended their Support Community. It's the best way to get help. There are both knowledgeable customers and corporate reps who have direct access to the engineers.
And please understand that I'm not trying to be a jerk, nor sound like one, but the second one is that HughesNet isn't responsible for this type of issue, nor figuring it out, though they will attempt to do so when you ask on their Support Community.
Being that I can't help you, I'll get out of the way. Good luck to you.
VeteranSatUser, Champion
Again, best of luck, but I don't see how your ISP is responsible at all.
Anniem05
In fact, in spite of everything, I have been a Hughes.net customer for over 10 years. I would say I have been pretty loyal. Wouldn't you?
Stephen Rice, Champion
GabeU, Champion
Regarding the HughesNet thread, if you're referring to the one titled "Hacked Router", I was a part of that thread and continued to follow it. While it's clear something happened with the person's system, what the person assumed happened didn't, and couldn't, yet they were dead set on what they assumed being the only possibility rather than any of the other possibilities listed.
I don't think anyone here is dismissing your issue, only the assumed cause.
Anniem05
GabeU, Champion
Did you see this system log in the Connected Device Info or in the Wifi settings section? If one of those, did it say LAN or WiFi for the connection?
Like I said above, though, their phone help ranges from adequate to totally useless. It sounds like you got the latter, that time.
VeteranSatUser, Champion
What you describe sounds like a device is/was connected in your home. Did it actually say "Samsung TV"?
Anniem05
Anniem05
GabeU, Champion
BTW, in case you didn't see my post below, which I've subsequently deleted, and which I tried to post before someone replied to your post and locked it so that you couldn't edit or delete it, NEVER post your DSS. That's your account number.
Maybe a rep will see this and delete you post for you.
fmj77
GabeU, Champion
Anniem05
Anniem05
GabeU, Champion
I definitely would look into what fmj recommended, especially before you start with ViaSat just to make sure your PCs are clean. Or, like the option I gave, install new hard drives and reinstall software from sources you know to be safe.
Anniem05
GabeU, Champion
Anniem05
GabeU, Champion
Anniem05
Anniem05
Casual Observer
Anniem05
Anniem05
Anniem05
Anniem05
Casual Observer
https://community.hughesnet.com/
Anniem05
Casual Observer
GabeU, Champion
Anniem05
deb dour
Casual Observer
Anniem05
Casual Observer
Many long time subscribers however have opted to extend it with their own third party router since the Viasat modem/router only offers basic features.
GabeU, Champion
Sorry the issue couldn't be resolved, but I'm glad that you have ViaSat as an alternative. Another HughesNet user just switched and, thus far, appears to be very pleased.